After nine years living in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, I'm now living in the French Alps. The natives seem friendly ...guess I'll stick around a while.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

82. Can you believe it? This is my 82nd post on this blog. I'm amazed that I'm still here and still manage to find something to write about. Admittedly, maybe the Happy Donald Hamburger House is not the most exciting subject, but there has been the occational rocketfire to make up for it.Today was payday at the paper project. The women are in charge of all the money now, so I was just there pasting together bookmarks and lending psychological support. The cash was handed out as each woman stepped forward. But at the end, the President had one more woman to pay and was 10,000 cfa short. The money had just been counted fifteen minutes before, so the hunt began. We all hunted under the tables and behind the shelves. Finally, each woman came and showed the money she had been given. Amazingly, the mystery was solved. Mariam had gotten 40, 000 istead of 30,000 cfa. Two bills had been tightly stuck together and she hadn't noticed. We're lucky she's so honest!That taken care of, we all breathed a sigh of relief. It was a very short sigh. Eugenie, the president, couldn't find her money. She rumaged in her purse, then we all started a re-enactment of the search we had just undertaken a few minutes before. We'd been looking for about half an hour when I opened a notebook that had been sitting in front of me. I paged through it and found the money. I handed it over to Eugenie, saying "It wasn't me! I swear!" which the women all thought was very funny.All the excitement certainly has me thinking that payday is going to have to be a little more organized in the future.

2 comments:

I have been lurking on your site for about a week now, and it is a delight. I love the combination of completely normal family life, with kids at hamburger land, against those, it could only happen here moments.